Comment by visarga
10 days ago
> The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some way, but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy people that have gained control of everything.
You are describing platform capture. Be it Google Search, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, X, App Store, Play Store, Amazon, Uber - they have all made themselves intermediaries between public and services, extracting a huge fee. I see it like rent going up in a region until it reaches maximum bearable level, making it almost not worth it to live and work there. They extract value both directions, up and down, like ISPs without net-neutrality.
But AI has a different dynamic, it is not easy to centrally control ranking, filtering and UI with AI agents. You can download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta. Now it is AI agents that got the "ear" of the user base.
It's not like before it was good - we had a generation of people writing slop to grab attention on web and social networks, from the lowest porn site to CNN. We all got prompted by the Algorithm. Now that Algorithms is replaced by many AI agents that serve users more directly than before.
>You can download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta.
You can download a model. That doesn't necessarily mean you can download the best model and all the ancillary systems attached to it by whatever service. Just like you can download a web index but you probably cannot download google's index and certainly can't download their system of crawlers for keeping it up to date.